A House at the End of the Track

by Michelle Lawson

  ‘It’s basically in an English village… there’s quite a history around there with the English and obviously next to Carcassonne it’s perfect for them. He buys in English food and sells it on to shops around the area.’ Tina bent over her laptop, picking out what she thought I’d be interested in. ‘He’s got a poppy fair going on, look, two Chelsea pensioners are going. There’s a monthly book exchange for the Brits, it’s huge. There you go, Cornwall clotted cream tea… scones and jam. Oh, and a link to Mr Sausage, he’s quite an interesting man, he makes his own English sausages.’

  This was more like the British stereotype that I’d been hearing about. I looked up the website and it continues to advertise a surprising number of English food shops dotted around the Aude and further east, stocking quintessential British grocery products, many of which I’d have thought have perfectly good French versions, such as jam and marmalade. The website also offers a platform for English incomers to advertise their services: joiners, English television installation and will-making as well as English-speaking cancer support. It all looked more lively than anything I’d seen in the Ariège, but there again, the Aude département has a more sizeable population of Brits, whereas those in Ariège could never sustain such enterprises.

  Tina was knowledgeable about the food supply process. ‘People drive down with the goods, and if you’re a seller then you have to price it at a certain rate. If you ever drive down here you could get paid to bring certain goods.’ She seemed to be offering this as a suggestion to me, but I shook my head at the idea. It reminded me of when I drove on the ferry to come down here, staring into the Land Rover in front that was rammed full of toilet paper, about a year’s supply for an average family. I’d wondered why on Earth anyone would need to bring a 4×4 load to France when the country was able to cope perfectly well with supply and demand.

  I also thought about Pat and John and their car-loads of bacon, and wondered whether there was something that they hadn’t told me.

  Welcome To Valley Cottage

  It was ten months since I’d last talked to Lynn. On a hot October afternoon we’d sat in white deckchairs emboldened with a red St George’s cross, shouting above the noise of a concrete mixer as her partner Steve prepared the foundation platform of their building plot. Back then Lynn had been enthusiastic about the “absolutely beautiful Ariège” and optimistic about her forthcoming job interview for a professional healthcare position.

  Now it was the following August. Cycling past the house, I’d been pleased to catch sight of Lynn in the garden and soon she was offering to show me around the completed interior of the house. Outside, the shiny slate roof was in place, although the terracotta block walls were starkly awaiting their final rendering. My eyes were drawn to spray-painted graffiti that shouted out Lynn and Steve welcome you to Valley Cottage around the front door, as well as Max is the king! sprayed onto the wall facing the road. I also noticed a black metal nameplate bearing the English house name. The St George’s deckchairs were still there, placed next to a small inflatable plunge pool. Steve said a quick hello before turning to shout in slow and careful English to a man leaning out of his car window on the road above. They appeared to be arranging a time to go and work. ‘He’s a builder moved down here from Paris,’ said Lynn. ‘Steve helps him out now and then.’ I was glad to hear that they’d both found employment. But the house was already up for sale.

  It turned out that Lynn had jumped the gun in recommending the “quality of life” here before the concrete of the house foundations had even set. I said I was sorry to hear they were packing up so soon, but that they’d probably had some fun along the way. ‘No,’ said Lynn, shaking her head, ‘we haven’t enjoyed the experience at all. We have hardly any time off and we rarely go anywhere. And I miss English culture.’ I turned to Steve, hoping for something more positive, but he looked gloomy.

  ‘Well, it’s different here, isn’t it – everything shuts down between 12 and 2, you can’t do anything.’ It sounded an underwhelming reason to move back to England, but the notorious French bureaucracy had also played a part in making them fed up with life in France. Lynn seemed worn out by the different processes that were notorious for their complexity, such as claiming back for doctor’s bills and registering their cars. Even being in the unusual and enviable position of having a professional job hadn’t helped.

  ‘I thought having done some French at school and going to classes for two years before we came would be ok,’ she said, but from the very first day in a healthcare job, Lynn had felt badly overwhelmed by the fast pace and the lack of support from colleagues. Moving down to a more junior role, she now found it easier to cope but it was frustrating, since she was over-qualified. They had had enough and were looking forward to moving back to the English Midlands.

  The previous year she’d been aware that it wouldn’t be a totally smooth ride but she’d spoken positively about being prepared to ride the waves. ‘I know there are going to be some downs and you’ve got to be fairly strong. You know, I did question whether I was doing the right thing last year because we were out the end of July, and the 3 weeks we were here we had 6 lovely days, and the rest it rained and it rained, torrential rain, and I was gutted because we were moving from somewhere where it rains every day.’ She pulled a face. ‘It was a case of oh my God, what am I coming to? Plus there’s not an awful lot around, and when it’s miserable, it’s bloody miserable.’

  Ten months later it was clear that the trials of building a large house whilst living in a frozen-up caravan over an exceptionally harsh Pyrenean winter had ground them down to a point of no return. They’d rented a caravan on a nearby campsite, but as the temperatures dropped to below minus 20, they’d been left to cope with no water or flushing toilet, and nowhere to empty the bucket, for 56 days. At some point, without water access, Steve drank from the river in desperation, despite Lynn’s warning about cows on the opposite bank, and he contracted dysentery. But for Lynn the “worst ever day” was when 120 sheets of plasterboard arrived in the snow and had to be carried down the steep drive to the house. In the end they’d made a sledge out of pallets and rope, working until night time to get the plasterboard indoors.

  ‘We came here for the weather,’ she said. ‘We did it all wrong.’

  Rewinding back to the previous October, my meeting with Lynn had been a kind of deliberately-by-chance meeting. I’d been cycling along one of the wider and sunnier river valleys coming down from the high ground, pedalling through a small village that had little sign of life – there was a small café dominated by the towering church nearby, but the tables were all empty. As the road began to rise my eye was caught by a building plot with two unmistakeably English deckchairs; the red St George’s crosses on their white background stood out sharply against the grey concrete platform. I stopped and peered over the edge of the road, noticing a British-registered car parked alongside the plot. There didn’t seem to be anyone about, but asking around, I found out that the builders were a newly arrived English couple. Intrigued by the symbolic deckchairs, I planned another bike ride past the site, and bingo, there they were, working on the house foundations. Lynn seemed pleased to stop work and chat about their project, pulling the deckchairs away so that we could hear each other over the grind of the concrete mixer.

  Like Pat and John, Lynn and Steve had been introduced to this corner of France by an estate agent. ‘We didn’t really know France very well to be honest. It wasn’t a case that we’d had regular visits over here; it was really because I spoke French a little from school and France isn’t a million miles away from England, which is important because we’ve got adult children back in England.’ It was an unusual case of language being the deciding factor without much knowledge of the actual country, although they were aware of the clichés associated with the Brits in France. ‘We wanted to go and engage in French culture, so we knew we didn’t want to go to the Dordogne. We wanted the weather, and somewhere w
ith outdoor activities and skiing, so we phoned up a couple of the estate agents and one of them said that Ariège is absolutely beautiful.’

  I’d been wondering how far the internet was encouraging people to purchase property in areas they weren’t at all familiar with. Before the web, prospective buyers must surely have driven around, getting a feel for places, whereas now it seems like people feel satisfied with making their discoveries via the screen. ‘We did a little bit of research on the computer, to see what the area’s got to offer, and that was all really. We’ve had to rely on the internet since because we haven’t been here on site to project manage the work.’ Nevertheless, the internet had been slow to trickle down to this corner of France. ‘Email hasn’t really arrived here, and with our architect that was a big problem because he only did faxes. We had to go and buy a fax machine because he didn’t understand the internet.’

  This was 2011 and I’d been aware that there were still pockets of local resistance to the digital revolution; Juliette had told me she’d chased off a couple of men in suits who’d been knocking on doors to talk about bringing the internet to the valley. ‘We don’t want those sort of changes here,’ she’d said, although her children sometimes knocked on my door to make use of my mobile broadband. And I’d heard of a demonstration in Massat where locals had lain down in the road to protest against new mobile network masts.

  It was becoming common to find one spouse reliant on the other for speaking the local language. Some slight frustrations emerged from Lynn about the pressures of being the one who speaks French, and Steve’s difficulty in grasping even the basics; he “just about does a oui”. ‘When letters come through the post, when the phone rings, it’s thrown at me straight away, even when I’m in the shower.’ She was still at the stage of having a fear of phones. ‘I hate it. I look at the number and think, do I or don’t I?’ She took a sharp intake of breath. ‘It depends on what mood I’m in, whether I answer it or not.’

  I was beginning to notice that those whose French was developed beyond a basic level often displayed the least confidence, and vice versa. Pat and John came across as happy with their fairly basic French, blaming communication breakdowns on the recipient’s lack of understanding. Yet Gerald, whose competence was the envy of the other incomers, spoke regretfully about not having that 100% understanding. And now Lynn was admitting to not answering the phone if she didn’t feel up to it, despite being able to hold down a job as well as converse with the local French, who sounded as if they were lurking around to talk to her all the time. ‘On the campsite it got to the stage where we were having to duck behind the caravan and walk along the top to avoid them all, because they don’t just stop and say, Hi, you alright? An hour later you’re still there, engaging in conversation.’

  Like Hebden Bridge

  The idea that English migration to France was a middle-class phenomenon was beginning to show its cracks here in the foothills of the Pyrenees. I don’t doubt that the majority of British incomers in France would fit somewhere within the centre of our social class scale, but it was clear that things in the Ariège were a little different. Pat had positioned herself as scornful of the Muriels of Mirepoix, using an unmistakeably posh accent to voice them, and Tina had also placed herself apart from the wealthier Brits with their pre-dinner drinks overlooking the pool. Now, as the cement mixer whirred, Lynn began to describe how they were not like the other English who came to France. ‘We’re very ordinary, very working class background. There’s no airs and graces about us, what you see is what you get.’ I gathered that she’d felt some concern that the other English out here might be the opposite, “a little bit more public school type”, which is why she’d become excited when an English estate agent had told her that the Ariège was “very much like Hebden Bridge, a very hippy area” in the north of England. ‘You can see in the way people dress around here, and I thought, yeah, this’ll probably suit us better. I’m not into pretentiousness.’

  Like the others, Lynn used the Dordogne as a benchmark. ‘I think people come here because they don’t want that Dordogne thing. They want to take part in the French culture. They don’t want the English on the doorstep all the time. It’s ok to be friendly, but not to rely on them and fall heavily on them, which I think is what happens in the Dordogne.’ She also associated the place with a kind of higher class “pretentiousness”, having experienced some of this in a French class back in England. ‘They were all so pretentious and it was so la-di-da,’ she laughed, ‘and I just thought oh God.’ She then put on a posh accent, saying, ‘They said where’s your land, where’ve you bought then? And they said Ohhh, where’s that, I haven’t been to the Ariège. And nobody knew it! And I thought, well, you won’t because you probably haven’t stepped outside your villa in the Dordogne. They were in just a completely different league to me.’

  It was hard not to laugh at the plummy vowels and imagine the rest of the class shaking their heads at this place in France they’d never heard of. More seriously, I began to see the deckchairs and the sprayed graffiti as a stab at class counter-culture. Lynn and Steve were making a statement and not just of who they were, but of who they weren’t. They didn’t have a villa among the other middle-class Brits, a neat house with a neutral public face. Their own house, standing rather grandly in the valley, had been brought down to earth with its graffiti and its English name.

  I showed Lynn the teashop menu and she smiled at it. ‘It’s like they’re trying to cater for both the English and the French there,’ she laughed. ‘We do like our carrot cake, don’t we?’ I sat waiting for the contempt that everyone else so far had brought in, and when it didn’t arrive I pointed out that others had turned up their noses at the clumsy mix of English and French, saying that they would never go in there. ‘Really?’ she said, genuinely aghast. ‘Why would that offend me? It’s like I say, the sort of person I am, I wouldn’t be offended by that.’ Her next comment foreshadowed the regrets about missing English culture that she would raise with me the following summer. ‘What I really miss is the takeaways. Ringing up on a Saturday night and thinking let’s get a Chinese, let’s get an Indian or I’ll nip into the fish and chip shop. There’s none of that. That would be heaven.’

  It was all part of that contradiction that lay just beneath the surface of people’s experiences: on the one hand they enthused over what they liked about France and its customs, claiming like Lynn to want to engage in French culture. At the same time they continued to hanker after what was familiar to them from the old life. And this was why Life in France, in English sometimes went no further than viewing it as a voyeur, from a convenient distance; engaging in French culture through the window.

  Back to the following summer, when I was being shown around the almost-completed house that was already up for sale. For Lynn and her partner it was the end of a dream, one that they admitted they’d approached the wrong way. She gestured towards the plunge pool. ‘After the stress of working all I want to do on my day off is sit in that, but Steve gets annoyed because I’m not helping with the house,’ she said. She described the long drive to work on twisting roads in the dark winter months, to a job that was well below the level and the salary that she had been on back in England. Having to fight for the occasional day relaxing in an inflatable plunge pool while your partner tried to drag you inside to decorate was not the idyllic life she’d have imagined. It was also clear that living a long way from English friends and family had hit them hard. The first time I spoke with her, she’d been adamant that they wouldn’t be looking to spend time with other English people, but the reality was that they missed them. The St George flag deckchairs, the “Welcome to Valley Cottage” graffiti and even the English house name were symbols of who and what they still were, but they also conveyed an attempt to broadcast their Englishness. Viewed from the roadside, the graffiti in particular was an invitation – perhaps even a plea – to passers-by. We’re English, please stop and talk to us!


  I could understand how that idea of France as a “return to Britain in the 1950s” might be compelling if you’d grown uncomfortable with modern-day Britain, but it was hardly an idyllic life if you had to earn a living doing whatever was available from a limited range of options. The laid-back anti-commercialisation of the Ariège was described by forum members as part of its allure, but here was Steve complaining about the shops closing at lunchtime. People were eager to reinvent themselves as adventurous, appreciative of another culture and what it symbolised, and in defining who they were, they drew heavily on the idea of avoiding the other Brits and British culture. But our capacity for adaptation can be limited by those enduring aspects of the self, our long-standing routines and attitudes, some of which we might not even want to change. As one male retired member said to me, ‘You can’t just forget all these things that you’ve grown up with and been used to.’

  Some of this had been acknowledged by incomers on the online forum, those who recognised the contradictions between portraying a more independent, integrated and linguistically competent lifestyle, and taking comfort from the familiar English community. One member had summed it up by warning a “newbie” member who was about to arrive: Do not be too dependent on British people. I realise that it is more comforting to mix with the rest of the expat residents, but try to get a balance between the two. The newcomer replied that they were not going to become dependent on anybody, but she then justified her offline networking requests as logical, claiming it was important to get the comfort from expats as these are the people who know how things work in England. They know what problems and differences we may be up against when we arrive.